Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Skottie Young whipped up a quick, direct bit of inking I right click saved from twitter. I'll use it for the photoshop selection-to-path-to-fill gimmick I like for illustrator type clean up in photoshop.

I use levels to clean up the line art so it's ready, then go to channels and duplicate the (single) channel if grayscale mode , the (blue) channel if rgb mode.
This is for use in selection of the black line art.

(PS Young did the drawing from memory of a book's cover. He wanted the name for it.
His sketch prompted someone to come up with MONSTER ATTACK NETWORK) cover posted below.

Use photoshop's pen tools to edit the path if you feel like it. The point of this process is to be very direct from rough pencils or inks to this cleaner conversion. Temptations to edit like illustrtor should probably be resisted. Not really the point.

The tolerance for path making has rounded, averaged, how the line looks. This might be detail damaging and not for everyone's style. But it might be just what the doctor ordered for whipping out a lot of sketching and still being able to get a clean result by the end.

The path is scalable. The line would be as clean if the path was scaled to quadruple size and then filled.

Added, the original from the top post so you can toggle between the two.

If you want to keep the path, save with a name. Any new path is the work path, erasing the old.
The "fuzzy" appearance in this illo results from the path being selected and that line being overlayed on the art. Click off the path to deselect and hide path.
That's it.
Anything that is confusing, make a comment. I'll edit for clarity or answer with my own comment.